Background. Previous research indicates that individuals with seasonal depression (SD) do not exhibit the memory biases for negative self-referent information that characterize non-seasonal depression (NSD). The current study extended this work by examining processing of self-referent emotional information concerning potential future events in SD.Method. SD and NSD patients, along with never-depressed controls, completed a scenario-based measure of likelihood estimation for future positive and negative events happening either to the self or to another person.Results. SD patients estimated future negative events as more likely to happen to both the self and others, relative to controls. In contrast, in the NSD sample this bias was specific to self-referred material. There were no group differences for positive events.Conclusions. These data provide further evidence that the self-referent bias for processing negative information that characterizes NSD can be absent in SD, this time in the domain of future event processing.

The majority of the literature investigating depression pertains to individuals from European Western cultures, despite recognition that depression ranks as one of the most debilitating diseases worldwide. This raises questions as to whether current depression models and interventions can be applied universally or whether they are limited to European Western groups. The current study found that pan-culturally those with MDD had similar structuring of their life story relative to controls. However, there were some cultural differences that need to be considered (e.g., Malay individuals provided less detailed, less elaborate and less emotionally diverse life stories and while the British MDD group had greater compartmentalization than British controls, the Malay MDD group had lower levels of compartmentalization than Malay controls). Limitations of the study included group differences in gender and mood at the time of testing. Cultural differences in the number of attributes used may have influenced findings. Only the Malay group completed the individualism-collectivism measure.